Secretary of State John Merrill said Thursday his office is doing all it can to respond to voter ID requests. But they don’t know the scope of the need in the state.

The Secretary of State's Office does not have estimates of the needs for voter ID cards among the more than 3 million registered voters in Alabama, and Merrill said Thursday they do not plan to.

“We don’t want to expend our energies and resources in trying to identify that need when we’re trying to meet it each and every day,” he said.

The remarks came Thursday amid a broader discussion of voter registration and preparedness for the coming elections. Merrill said nearly 991,000 Alabamians had registered to vote since he took office as Secretary of State in 2015, with about two-thirds of those numbers coming from electronic registrations.

The state’s photo voter ID law went into effect for the 2014 elections. Voters must show a valid photo ID — like a driver's license — when showing up at the polls. Supporters of the measure said it would ensure the integrity of elections; opponents note that in-person voter fraud is exceptionally rare. The state offers voter ID cards free of charge to those who need them.

The NAACP and Greater Birmingham Ministries sued to block the law in 2015, arguing it put an undue burden on rural and minority voters. Deuel Ross, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which represented the plaintiffs, said other states with photo ID laws have tried to reach out to voters without them.

"When (Georgia) passed the voter ID law, they did a database search matching between DMV and the voter registration database, and they tried to contact voters who didn’t have voter ID," he said in a phone interview Wednesday. "They affirmatively contacted people on that list. Alabama hasn’t done any of that."

U.S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler dismissed the lawsuit in January.

“In Alabama, the law has no discriminatory impact because it does not prevent anyone from voting, not when free IDs are issued in every county, or at home, under conditions that any registered voter can meet,” Coogler wrote.

A voter presents his photo ID before he voting in the state's primary election Tuesday, June 3, 2014, at Tuscaloosa Academy in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)(Photo: Butch Dill AP)

An expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case estimated that a little over 118,000 voters in the state either had no photo ID or one that could face a challenge. Attorneys for the Secretary of State’s Office challenged that assertion, arguing data showed black and Hispanic voters were more likely to live near areas where they could obtain photo ID. Ross said the black voters least likely to have the proper identification lived far away from those areas.

Merrill also challenged the NAACP estimate Thursday but said he did not have estimates as to what the need might be. Through June 30 of last year, the state issued 13,442 voter identification cards.

Merrill said the office was willing to go “anywhere” to address the needs of particular voters, but said those initiatives would have to come from local groups, officials or nonprofits, because the office was “not into targeting different groups and different folks.”

“Am I going to talk to people who live in a housing project in Heflin?” Merrill said. “The answer to that is ‘Yes, if the people in Cleburne County say we need to have a voter ID drive and a voter registration drive.'”

Ross said the plaintiffs' concern was the state's unwillingness to recognize that certain groups in Alabama, like African-Americans, have traditionally had difficulties accessing the polls.

"If you know there’s a large population that in our opinion and according to the evidence disproportionately lack the ID, you would think you would get the word out to those people," he said.

Merrill and staff also addressed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week in Husted vs. A. Phillip Randolph Institute, which upheld an Ohio law that allowed purges of voters who had missed an election. The Secretary of State’s Office said it used a different procedure, involving mailing of cards to registered voters to ensure status. The office, staff said, only moves voters to inactive status when those cards are returned; recipients do not need to return those cards to maintain their status.